Bryan Stevenson
speaker
1,245 appearances
5 recordings
3 series
first heard Jun 2025
last heard 3 Jul
Bryan Stevenson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And if our laws and our policies don't reflect the fact that she is more than that moment of of violence, that moment of reaction, then we're going to do something unjust. We're going to put her in prison for life without parole. We may even sentence her to death. We have reduced her to this worse act. I've never represented anybody who was only the crime they've committed.
And that's the difficulty of not being more explicit about this concept that we are all more than the worst thing we've ever done.
Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think what's been very gratifying about my work is that I see that play out every day in the clients that I represent. I represent a lot of children, right? And when you're 13 or 14 and you end up being sentenced to life in prison in an adult facility, there's a presumption that you must be awful and irredeemable. And I just think that's a mistake.
I think what distinguishes children from adults is that they're in a constant state of change. They are not who they are going to be anymore. In a decade, physically, emotionally, psychologically, biologically, we change as we go through adolescence. And in many states, we don't permit that change to take place.
We have 13 states in the United States that have no minimum age for trying a child as an adult. So I represent eight and nine-year-old kids sometimes who are facing 50- and 60-year prison sentences.
Eight and nine-year-old children. We have these 13 states where there's no minimum age. When these laws took effect about 40 years ago, I started getting calls from parents of five and six-year-old children who were being put in handcuffs in kindergarten for behaviors. And it was this kind of zero tolerance, this mindset that children can just be crimes.
And I think what you're saying about the capacity for change is most dramatic in that population for me, because one of the things I quickly learned is that when I represent young kids, I can't just be a lawyer. I've got to be a parent. and a brother and a counselor and a friend, because children in these really hostile, violent environments are still yearning for affection.
They're still yearning for something that makes them feel valuable. And so one of the things I quickly realized is that my young clients were constantly wanting me to visit them, like every week. And they'd be in prisons, you know, hundreds of miles away. And I was like, you know, I can't. So I started doing this thing where I would say, I'm going to send you a book.
When you read the book, I will come and see you to talk about it. And my clients, who were many of them very reluctant readers, some of them not good readers, started this whole reading thing. And I would send them harder and harder books, and I would pick the books, and then I started letting them pick the books.
A client who was sentenced to life when he was 14, and I've now represented him for 30 years. And a couple of years ago, he called me late at night, and I was a little kind of provoked because he's not supposed to call that late. But I picked up and I said, why are you calling so late? He says, it's an emergency. I said, what's the emergency?
He said, I finished the book that you sent me, and you have to come and see me. Wow. I said, I don't even remember what book I sent you. And then he told me that he had just finished reading The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky. My favorite book in college. It was a book that just changed my thinking.
And when he started talking excitedly about all of the things he wanted to discuss that he read in this book, It just moved me so much. And here I was talking to someone who people think is beyond redemption, beyond hope, beyond restoration. And he's talking about how much he loves the characters in this book who are constantly being compassionate, who are navigating difficulty.
And I think that's the gift of believing that we can become better.
Yeah, I think one of the most tragic things that's happened over the last half century is this false idea that some children aren't children. And it was spread by criminologists and a lot of policy people in the 1980s who were going around arguing that some kids look like kids and sound like kids. They said, but these aren't children. And they actually came up with this term.
They said, these are, quote, super predators. And that label was applied to a lot of children. We started doing very unhealthy things. We created pipelines from schoolhouses to jailhouses. We started lowering the minimum age for trying children
As adults, we created this zero-tolerance mindset, and we added to the stress that hundreds of thousands of kids are living with because they're growing up in violent families and violent communities. They're not being embraced. They're not being hugged. They're being associated. Ian, whose poem you read, was 13 years old. when he was arrested and ultimately convicted of a crime.
It was a non-homicide offense. It took place in Florida. He was so small that they had to cut the legs off of the uniform to get him something that would fit him. They decided not to put him in general population because children in adult facilities become targets for a lot of sexual abuse and violence and mistreatment.
So they put him in solitary confinement where they deprived him of any contact with other human beings. And of course, they didn't change the rules for this 13-year-old child. They just, they applied the adult rules. So to get out of solitary, he had to never make a mistake. He had to never complain, never be loud, never do this, never do that.
And as a young kid in that environment, he was never able to do that. So he ended up spending 18 years in solitary confinement. 18?
Is that legal? It is something we are constantly challenging, but there are no restrictions currently in our law that would prohibit something like that. And so the first time I met him, I couldn't even be in the same room with him. Because they didn't allow him to touch another human being. And so his poetry comes out of a kind of isolation, a kind of anguish that is heartbreaking.
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